Dandelion Sandwich

No garden? Eat your lawn!

There’s a Roman dish called cicoria ripassata that I adore. To me, this recipe ranks among the world’s greatest green side dishes. The alchemical transformation that bitter wild greens undergo as a result of this two-stage cooking is nothing short of miraculous, unlocking fathoms of umami and an addictively nuanced sweetness. It’s also incredibly easy to make.

You’re going to have to use the Force with this one, because I’m not giving you any exact measurements. But fear not; it’s easy to nail this as long as you use your senses as you cook. And once you make it, and see how good and easy it is, you’ll be one step closer to cooking by feel and intuition. You’ll never look at a dandelion the same way again.

First, harvest a big bunch of dandelion greens (or buy them from a farmer or a store). Other chicories work too, but try it with wild dandelions if you can. You want to harvest the leaves before they start to flower, at which point they become unpalatably bitter. Get a large pot of water boiling on the stove—the one you use to boil pasta, or your biggest stockpot if you really went nuts with the gathering. Bring it to a rollicking boil, then add the greens, pushing them down so everybody gets submerged. Let them boil for at least 5 minutes, or as long as 10; you’re not looking for a quick blanch here but a proper cook.

In Roman restaurants, the wild chicories are almost exclusively cooked whole, such that you can twirl them around your fork, spaghetti-style. There’s still an al dente quality to the stalks, and it makes for some focused chewing. In this case, because you want to take clean bites of a sandwich, you want to err on the side of softness. To ensure easy biting you can also chop the leaves into 3”-ish lengths pre-boiling, or chop the boiled greens once they’re drained and cooled a bit. I rarely bother with this.

Give the greens a prod and stir from time to time, making sure that what’s on top ends up down below for even cooking. When they’re dark green and getting quite soft and limp, strain them out and dry them well in a salad spinner. Get an iron skillet or similarly heavy pan going over medium high heat, add a generous glug of good olive oil, and then add the greens. You want the pan to be spitting hot (which is why you don’t want the greens to be too wet), and oiled enough so they don’t stick.

Move them around pretty regularly, making sure to flip and stir so that lots of surface area gets to spend some quality time against the hot iron. Add more oil if the pan gets dry. You don’t want to deep fry the greens, but you do want a proper sauté. When they’re completely wilted and beginning to pick up some nice Maillard color—which takes 5 minutes or so, but might be more or less depending on the heat of your pan and the quantity of your greens—add a smashed clove of garlic to the pan and work the greens around so they get some contact with the garlic and it gets some proper heat from the pan, catching a bit of color but not burning.

Add some salt, too, and be generous. Do it a fat pinch at a time, stirring well and tasting as you go. Salt tames bitterness, and is the key to unlocking the complexity of these greens. When you’re happy, put the greens in a serving bowl and pour another lashing of oil over the top. You want them shiny and slick. The oil will get greener.

Let them sit while you slice your bread (in this case a field garlic focaccia, about which more later), toast or grill it a bit, and then assemble your sandwiches, taking care not to skimp on the greens—pile them on like deli meat. Then press down on each sandwich gently so the oil soaks into the bread, and enjoy.

Seriously, if you make this, let me know—am I wrong?

If I were 20 years younger, I’d seriously consider buying a food truck and parking it somewhere well-traveled and just slinging these at lunchtime every day. I would fashion myself after Baudelaire in Richard Brautigan’s 1958 poem The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, of which The Flowerburgers is part 4 of 9.

Baudelaire opened
up a hamburger stand
in San Fransisco,
but he put flowers
between the buns.
People would come in
and say, "Give me a
hamburger with plenty
of onions on it."
Baudelaire would give
them a flowerburger
instead and the people
would say, "What kind
of a hamburger stand
is this?"

They would sell out every day. My truck, which carried nothing but dandelion sandwiches, would become a viral sensation and I would get a TV show and a book deal and then vanish, absconding to some remote Mediterranean backwater to tend a garden, raise a few goats, and refuse all requests for interviews. And I would never share the secret. Luckily for you, none of that happened.

Connect with your inner goatherd by eating some wild weeds today. They can be a gateway drug to a deeper relationship with your food supply, which leads axiomatically to becoming a more skilled cook.